The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of political protests. The 2014 "Kiss of Love" campaign garnered national attention, sparking controversy as images of activists kissing in public and dragged into police vans flooded the media. In Unruly Figures, Navaneetha Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures-particularly the sex worker and the lesbian-are produced in the public imagination. Her analysis includes representations of the prostitute figure in popular media, trajectories of queerness in Malayalam films, public discourse on lesbian sexuality, the autobiographical project of sex worker and activist Nalini Jameela, and the memorialization of murdered transgender activist Sweet Maria, showing how various marginalized figures stage their own fractured journeys of resistance in the post-1990s context of globalization.

By bringing a substantial body of Malayalam-language literature and media texts on gender, sexuality, and social justice into conversation with current debates around sexuality studies and transnational feminism in Asian and Anglo-American academia, Mokkil reorients the debates on sexuality in India by considering the fraught trajectories of identity and rights.

About the Author

Navaneetha Mokkil is assistant professor at the Centre for Women's Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the coeditor of Thinking Women: A Feminist Reader.

Reviews

"Unruly Figures provides a provocative and theoretically rich account of the uneven terrain of contemporary sexual politics."

* Gender & Society *

"Social commitment and intellectual vigour make this journey adventurous, and the author transmits its spirit through her evocative, lyrical writing."

* Review of Development and Change *

"This is an elegantly written book that makes a persuasive case for what Mokkil frames as a queer reading practice of dissident sexuality that works to keep such tensions open."

* Journal of Asian Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9780295745572
Author Navaneetha Mokkil
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint University of Washington Press
Publisher University of Washington Press
Weight(grams) 408g